EVGA is my go to brand for Nvidia but they still have issues from my experience.

List of all Nvidia GPUs I have owned in the past 15 years Nvidia 6800 AGP 128MB (Bought in 2006, failed after 2 months due to PSU failure which took out entire system.) EVGA 8600 GT 256MB (Bought in 2007, failed after 3 years, EVGA replaced but changed warranty to 3 year and auto expired it, card is dead as of August 2014 from unkown causes) PNY 9600 GT 1GB (Bought in 2008, fan grinding after 6 months, PNY replaced as a courtesy due to computer error but also voided my warranty, card is now dead after failure to boot in 2013 testing) EVGA 9800 GT 1GB (Bought 2009, has not failed and was still functional as of 2013) EVGA 760 GTX 4GB (Bought in March 2014, was damaged in accident and had fan failure by June, second RMA card had dead fan and loud capacitor whine, and 3rd card was replaced in September. Current 760 has been functional since September 2014)

List of ATI/AMD GPUs I have owned in the past ~20 years ATI Rage II 4MB (Purchased in 1996, still functioning in an old Windows 95 machine) ATI 3D Rage Pro 16MB (Purchased in 1998, still functioning in an old Windows 98 machine) Radeon 9200 128MB (Purchased 2002, last I checked with the friend I gave it to it is still working) XFX Radeon HD 5770 1GB (Purchased in August 2010, recently gifted it to a friend, still functioning) XFX Radeon HD 5870 1GB (Purchased April 2011 due to low price of $205, still functioning and in use) R9 280X (Borrowed and currently not in my possession, card was purchased in 2014 and is still functional)

Quotethe_nerervarine ()

(I'm looking at you GTX 960 with your 128 bit interface and the first models of the GTX 970 with only 3.5 gb of Vram)

It's not that they purposefully gimped the cards, its just how they manufacture lower series GPUs.

Quotethe_nerervarine ()

The GTX 960 would a monster of a budget card if it had a 256 or 512 bit interface.

This is actually a good point and it wouldn't even cost Nvidia that much to do it. Nvidia is not alone in these regards though, AMD did the same thing with the 5770 compared to the 5870.

We should probably each bench our systems in SpaceEngine. We need a standard test of sorts so that proper system builds and their performance information can be added to the main post of this thread.

We should probably each bench our systems in SpaceEngine. We need a standard test of sorts so that proper system builds and their performance information can be added to the main post of this thread.

Agree completely. But it would have to based on several different stresses during SE. I think a great benchmark would be the current state of the Gamma and Delta quadrants of the Milky Way (Sorry huge Trek fan) and how smoothly each card performs in this area as there seems to be thousands of nebula in this area and I find it to be very taxing performance wise. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Also how fast LOD's are rendered at a static loader for 9.7.4 (lets say around 15-20) and how smooth the performance is by moving. Let me know what you think friend.

We need a standard test of sorts so that proper system builds and their performance information can be added to the main post of this thread.

SpaceEngineer suggested to me one time landing on a planet, reloading the shaders, and seeing what time was output in the log for generation. We can have a standard location, standard resolution, and standard settings, used for that benchmark. That will be a good test of landscape generation and memory. We can come up with something else for CPU, and something else again as another GPU test.

you would be insane to get a 980 over a 390x unless nvidia REALLY drops the price or releases the 8 GB version.

As an AMD fanboy I have to say you're way off on this one. The 390 and 390x are both re brands of the 290 and 290x with more vram and higher clock speeds. But it's still the Hawaii GPU that AMD has been using with their high end cards since the HD 7900 series.

I need your help, since my motherboard could not support Space Engine, and then broke, do I have to buy one, but I do not know which one to take, I would like some advice on how to choose one that can support Space Engine

the universe is made to be explored, but no one will ever visit it all

Yes. This is not exclusive to SpaceEngine however. If your PC is not up to date or very good and you run stressful programs on it then temperatures will be high, hardware stress will be high, and the PC life expectancy will drastically decrease. Simply having a computer turned on will break it down over time. No matter how good your PC is or how advanced technology gets this is simply the laws of physics in action.

For the moment i do not have to buy the motherboard, as soon as I post the features of my computer. My computer has not broken as soon as I started for the first time SE, but it broke due to SE for the first two years.

the universe is made to be explored, but no one will ever visit it all

Bought a 980 Ti SC this week, came in today and I can definitely recommend the GPU if you want something ridiculously powerful to run SE. Even with my bottlenecking due to my low/mid range AMD processor I have no troubles loading terrain at LOD2 above 60fps.

However with a $650+ pricetag(I spent $725) it is not really an option for most people

My XFX R7 240's fried, so I'm running my A8's onboard 8570D APU. It's usable with SE. Around 30-70 fps in close proximity to planets. Depending on how many textures are loaded on surface though, can drop as low as 10 fps in certain cases. Disabling Auroras vastly helped though. I have a 1920 x 1080 display, and I run SE in full screen @ 1280 x 720. I'm thinking of getting an EVGA GTX 750ti. 2 GB model. A card of these specifications generally enough to well suffice for this program?Thanks